Barbara Stanwyck (6 page)

This is Capra's best film with Stanwyck, the most unusual, and maybe the most personally revealing. “I accepted it, believed in it, loved it,” she said later. It begins with a map of China and some dissolves to Chinese natives running for their lives. Joseph Walker's glistening cinematography lets us know that Capra has caught Josef Von Sternberg fever in his visuals, and he seems to want to piggyback on the success of Sternberg's
Shanghai Express
(1932). These two films look alike and share a common background and technical filmic vocabulary, but their effect is as different as Stanwyck is from Marlene Dietrich—which is to say, as different as can be imagined.

We cut to a wedding party with English missionaries, as the Chinese keep running outside the door. The contrast is unsettling. Capra himself could be racist, as shown in McBride's book, but he was an unsettled racist, a “let's say everything I think and work it out later” sort, and this has the effect of pleasingly destabilizing all the racial points in
General Yen
. If a director of today were to cut from Chinese peasants evacuating to an English missionary social event, the film would almost be obligated to hit us over the head with the point about English obliviousness. But because Capra comes to this scene from his less certain 1930s viewpoint, the missionaries are seen as three-dimensional people, misguided in the extreme, but human and interesting.

At the party, Chinese men sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and a repressed, bespectacled girl says she can't wait to see the betrothed couple kiss. (She gets sternly reprimanded.) An old man missionary who has spent fifty years in China tells a story about teaching the tale of Jesus's crucifixion to Mongolian bandits, who listened to the details avidly. Later, he found out that the bandits crucified their next victims. “That, my friends, is China,” he says, and the camera whip pans to an older Chinese man, looking inscrutable. The actor playing this old missionary delivers his lines in the phony, portentous way of the deacon in
The Miracle Woman
, so it's clear that Capra is not at all on his side, even as his crucifixion story makes an uncomfortable impression.

We've been told at the party that Stanwyck's Megan Davis, the bride-to-be, is from an old Puritan family and that her father is a publisher. By this point, Capra knows that Stanwyck's range has widened and that she can play different kinds of women, women from different backgrounds and classes. Stanwyck was able to emphasize her Brooklyn accent if the
part called for it, but in
General Yen
she represses it to the point that it's barely noticeable.

Megan is introduced in a rickshaw that gets hit by General Yen's car, killing her driver. When she reprimands the General, he merely smiles and says, “Life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” Bewildered by his heartless sophistication, Megan gets into another rickshaw (the camera frames her behind the wood of this vessel, as if she needs to retreat from what she's just experienced), and she stares at Yen and the beautiful Chinese girl in his car with tender curiosity. Stanwyck's face is open and vulnerable, but it's Megan Davis's vulnerability, not Barbara Stanwyck's, or Ruby Stevens's. Paradoxically, Stanwyck has discovered that the more you hide behind a part that is different from yourself, the more you can reveal of your true self, an irony that might have pleased General Yen.

At the wedding party, Megan is boxed in again behind a wooden frame; she's been cloistered, but she wants to break out. She tries to share her experience with her hostess (Clara Blandick), saying that Yen looked “so civilized,” only to be met with a blast of concentrated racism: “They're all tricky, treacherous and immoral,” snaps the hostess, “I can't tell one from the other. They're all Chinaman to me.” This grossly energetic little outburst conveys exactly the kind of finger-pointing ugliness that Megan wants to escape.

Her fiancée, Dr. Robert Strike, is played by Gavin Gordan, who was the callow minister to Greta Garbo in her 1930 vehicle,
Romance
, and he's cast to type here, a solid do-gooder who wants to rescue some orphans from behind enemy lines, but has to get General Yen's permission first. The General scoffs at Megan's fiancée. Why does he want to save a few orphans? After all, he says, they're nameless. Such expressions make us see that the libertine General is almost as bad as the wedding party hostess, albeit in a radically different way. He's as awful as she is, but his awfulness is dangerously alluring because it's so aligned to sex, which he reveres, whereas her awfulness is a vile substitute for sex.

The firelight glistens on Megan's face as she rushes into the orphanage with Strike. She saves the kids but gets clubbed on the head for her trouble, and she is soon scooped up by the General, who has been hovering around her in his car. A series of dreamy, associative images of her fiancée and the General suggest Megan's confused psychological state as she wakes in a train with a cold cloth on her head. Sexual tension builds as Megan half-realizes her position, takes in Yen's concubine Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), then covers the small bit of her leg showing with her skirt when she catches Yen staring at her.

Capra then cuts to a phallic train hurtling through the night, having established a mood that is sensitive to Megan's fear and desire while also shyly identifying with Yen's viewpoint. Stanwyck is now lost to Capra. He's married another woman and given up hope of marrying his actress, but he wants to glorify her one more time, maybe exorcise her from his system, and he does so by making her play a repressed woman who opens up sexually on screen, just as the sexually abused Kay Arnold learned to open up emotionally.

Boldly, Capra wants to get at the truth of a certain kind of dirty, sexual power dynamic that is not aligned to anything pure or nice or conventionally romantic. From what we see of him, Gordan's fiancée is fine and good and Yen is a cruel, cynical dictator, yet we can tell right away who is the more deeply attractive man. We later learn that Yen had drugged Megan on the train and it's planted in our minds that he might have taken liberties with her, maybe with Mah-Li's enthusiastic help. Only later do we learn that his pride is such that he needs to conquer and destroy a woman's “good person” emotions before he can conquer her body. The General sees everything as conquest. And so Capra makes his film an anatomy of the sexual masochism he either experienced or sensed in Stanwyck.

Race is the dominant spice of this particular erotic dish. “You yellow swine!” Megan snarls the next morning, grabbing a nearby knife when she feels intimidated by her captor. Even Yen's easy-going Caucasian flunky, Jones (Walter Connelly) gets scared about the situation. “This is a white woman,” he whines, in the tone of someone who feels he ought to half-heartedly lodge an official protest. But Yen zaps him: “I have no prejudice against the color,” he quips in his jaunty way (Asther almost sounds Latino at certain points here, and this effect only emphasizes his bizarre, everything-rolled-into-one sexiness). Megan refuses dinner with the General and goes outside for some air; she looks at the moon, smokes a cigarette, and sits down in a large wicker chair. Across the way, some of Yen's people are frolicking playfully together, in a natural, sexy way, and Megan drowses in her chair.

We see a watery door. A caricatured “Chinese” Yen with long fingernails and feral looks breaks the door down. “Chinese” Yen is then superimposed over the real Yen, an effect that conveys Megan's racially based fear of him and her confusion over her feelings. Capra frames “Chinese” Yen's talon-like fingernails around Megan's horrified face as he creeps up on her to take her. The fingernails settle on her shoulders as she “struggles,” voluptuously (we can see that this is not a rape, but
a rape fantasy). A masked man comes in the window to save her: Is he her fiancée, or her father? The masked man punishes the Bad Yen, who disappears into a wall. He takes his black mask off … and it's the real Yen. There's a close-up of Megan's face, her eyes shining like distant harbor lights as a blurred background whirs behind her. And then she kisses Yen, amazingly enough (I imagine half of the Radio City audience of 1933 walked out at this point).

Megan wakes up and finds herself talking to Yen by the light of the moon. He says that he's banned all missionaries from his territory, and then he says that he'd like to laugh at her yet finds her admirable. The distinction he makes lets us know that Yen is a very intelligent man who too often retreats into adolescent nihilism. Then he puts the screws on: “There's never been a people more purely artist … and therefore more purely lover … than the Chinese,” he drawls, in Asther's cadenced, hypnotic voice, which finally seems to have no specific regionalisms at all.

This does it. Megan bathes, and Capra indulges himself filming Stanwyck's beautiful legs and then her bare back in a freestanding bathtub, with her hair up. He wants to pamper her and wait on her and turn this poverty-bred Brooklyn girl into an international movie goddess, worth idolizing not because she's remote, like Garbo or Dietrich, but because she's real. It's as if a husband suddenly saw his careworn wife in their Flatbush apartment as the sun hit her at just the right angle through the kitchen window, transfiguring her, but revealing her, too.

Megan looks at her made-up face in a mirror. In
The Miracle Woman
, Florence puts on make-up as her crooked promoter fusses around her, and the make-up seems to burn her skin, bringing home her own corruption, her prostitution of her faith. The make-up on Megan makes her look hard, even whorish, and this won't do; she wipes most of it off, just as Capra stripped Kay Arnold of her false eyelashes. Capra made a fetish of Stanwyck's naturalism and her open, yielding face. This stripped-down face is clearly sexy to him, and a large part of why he loved her on screen and in her dressing room, too, when he risked breaking her fabled concentration to murmur a few words of direction.

He sees in
General Yen
that her coolness can have a puritan quality, a kind of “I am above this” that Stanwyck used for protection, but which Megan Davis has been forced into. Perversely (
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, like sex itself, is nothing if not perverse), Capra makes Stanwyck give up her coolness from a “sheltered young girl” perspective that stands in total opposition to her own background. If
Forbidden
was personal but poor,
General Yen
and Stanwyck's performance in it have the rarefied impersonality of the highest art.

Megan preaches the Christian doctrine of mercy to the faithless Yen. “We're all of one flesh and blood,” she argues, as if she's falling back, with relief, on her old life, on things she's heard and believed to be true without ever testing them. “Really?” Yen asks, sniffing out her hypocrisy and taking advantage of it. “Do you mean that?” He puts his hand on hers; she recoils. “Words,” sneers Yen, “nothing but words.” At this point in her career, Stanwyck's slightly stilted way of talking, with all the emotions burning underneath the words, is due to her anxiety to speak correctly and not give away her lack of education. Capra uses this anxiety to represent Megan Davis's entrapment in learned attitudes that are not her own; inside, she's ready for rapturous, incorrect, liberating sexual enslavement.

Helplessly, Megan sentimentalizes Mah-Li, who actually is as treacherous as the General thinks she is, and he lets his whole empire go just to prove his point to Megan and disillusion her. She thinks she'll have to sleep with Yen because Mah-Li has betrayed him. When he intimates that she'll pay with her life instead, her shuddering reaction makes Yen cry, “You are afraid of death as you are afraid of life!” They embrace, and over the General's shoulder we see a startling close-up of Megan's eyes, glimmering with some recognition of her own nature so profound that it must extend to Stanwyck, too. Megan's recognition might be the polar opposite of what Stanwyck has discovered about herself, but that's the joy and the puzzle of acting on this elevated a level.

Yen goes to kill himself with the bitter tea of the title, while Megan makes herself up as heavily as Mah-Li did and humbly offers her body and her love to this man she cannot escape or explain. The last scene sees Megan on a boat with Connelly's Jones, who drunkenly talks about Yen while she stares off into the distance, her face caught in some frozen yet lively and yearning expression. Jones says, “You can crowd a lifetime into an hour.” He wonders if Yen is now a cherry tree, or the wind that is playing in Megan's hair. The film ends on this tantalizing bit of mood-making, as open and suggestive an ending as anyone could wish for this sublime work about the vagaries of desire, one of the most complex love offerings from a director to an actress in film history.

Seven years passed before Capra and Stanwyck made their fifth and final movie together,
Meet John Doe
(1941). In that time a lot had changed in their careers, particularly for Capra, who had won three best directing Oscars and had become acclaimed for bewildering “films of ideas” like
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(1936) and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939).
Meet John Doe
was the last of this queasy cycle of Capra message movies, and it's something of a nightmare picture, lost in contradictions,
second-guessing, and an overall self-hatred that often bleeds, hair-raisingly, into a pitch-dark misanthropy.

Meet John Doe
includes some of the worst scenes Capra ever filmed, especially a long drunk interlude with James Gleason's newspaper editor that exhibits the lowest kind of right-wing, flag-waving barroom self-pity, an unpleasantness that is only matched by the left-wing caricature of Edward Arnold's soft-spoken, absurdly villainous capitalist/fascist (with Capra at this point, you get the worst of all political persuasions). At the center of the movie is Gary Cooper, playing one of his mid-career bumpkins in a self-consciously dopey, “oblivious” manner to put over a character of incredible naiveté.